Conventionally, large web search engines have sold advertising space based on keyword-driven search results. For example, Yahoo! conducts auctions for certain keywords, and the highest bidders have their ads placed on pages containing Yahoo! search results, or they obtain preferred placement among the search results, i.e., at the top of the results list.
As web advertising has developed, a number of companies are acquiring large publisher bases from which they can sell advertisements. For instance, Google is signing up publishers into their AdSense ad network to broker publishing space from the publishers to a set of participating advertisers bidding for and purchasing the advertising space. Advertisers pay Google to serve advertisements to participants of the AdSense network. Google then pays some or all of the advertising revenue to the individual publishers. For example, a publisher in the AdSense network may have an article on its website that talks about digital cameras, and Google's AdSense displays digital camera advertisements from advertisers in the AdSense network on that website. Google auctions off the “digital camera” keyword to advertisers in its AdSense network and displays ads from the highest bidders.
However, there are a number of problems with this proprietary ad network model. First, companies that are building ad networks have an inherent conflict of interest because, as a broker for advertising deals, they represent both the publisher and the advertiser. Second, because there are multiple companies that are creating ad networks, advertisers have the burden of managing buys across many ad networks, which results in significant cost and complexity to the advertiser. Third, because publishers are for all practical purposes locked into a single ad network due to legal restrictions when signing up, the advertiser competition is limited, which results in lower return for the publishers. Fourth, the lack of general standards around terms and conditions, and behavioral segmentation is a major obstacle to reaching the full market value of online display advertising. There is also no current standardization across publishers for accepted media types and ad formats. Fifth, smaller publishers currently have very little power individually, even if they serve a hard-to-reach audience. Additionally, ISPs and other owners of large user databases are not realizing the full value of the information they have due to privacy concerns and lack of a proper marketplace.
For instance, elaborating on the lack of standards around terms and conditions of existing advertising transactions, there are a variety of disparate items in an advertising exchange that should be able to be automatically taken into account between different parties for transactions in an advertising exchange, but today, cannot be taken into account. An example of this lack of standards is with respect to tax rates, such as import and export tax rates, for participants in an exchange.
In this regard, currently, there is no clear way for exchange participants to understand the tax cycle that is applied to transactions between parties. Today, for instance, tax rates are applied by parties “willy nilly” without any true understanding of the propagation of costs that result from a change in tax rate. In this sense, tax rates cannot be understood in an apples-to-apples fashion between disparate parties because there is no way to normalize tax rates across all parties of an advertising exchange so that parties can understand the impact of tax rate changes on other parties in a more efficacious manner. Accordingly, what is desired is a way to normalize, view and modify the various tax rates (import, export, market, etc.) associated with an online advertising transaction between participants of an online exchange.
Moreover, oftentimes, when there are multiple advertisers bidding for the same publisher space, or when multiple publishers are competing for the same advertisers, each participant to the transaction may have different utility functions, which today manifest themselves in a variety of ways, and according to a variety of biases. Yet, there is no way for participants to automatically map their different utility functions to a sensible import or export tax rate selection, let alone, as part of an automatic mapping that dynamically changes in response to all other participants' tax rates. In other words, what is desired is a way to specify goals for advertising transactions that are automatically taken into account when populating tax rates for party transactions, and which is dynamically updated when other participants' tax rates are changed as a result of changing market conditions or changing utility functions of the other participants.
When one takes into consideration the myriad of other types of biases an advertiser or publisher may exhibit (e.g., preference for relevance, preference for quality, preference for time of day, preference for ecologically sound companies, etc.) in an exchange as part of an expression of their utility function, and that these preferences change over time, today, there is simply no way for participants to rationally set appropriate tax rates that address those preferences, let alone automatically. Thus, what is desired is a way to specify tax rates, such as import and export tax rates, for each participant of an advertising exchange, and to automatically adjust those tax rates based on ever evolving specific utility function(s) specified by participants of the advertising exchange.
The above-described deficiencies of current advertising environments are merely intended to provide an overview of some of the problems of today's advertising environments, and are not intended to be exhaustive. Other problems with the state of the art may become further apparent upon review of the description of various non-limiting embodiments of the invention that follows.